Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Laem Chabang
This is as close as we
will get to Bangkok, and many are taking the bus two-and-half hours each way to
the city. We pass having spent five days
there a few years ago. We take the local
tour and see another temple, a cement carving yard where they make elephants
and other things for garden displays.
They also have a few brightly painted giraffes and zebras and
chickens. I presume the chickens are
local. We see another general market and
a fish market, miles of beach front and a shopping stop. The bus lets us off at the shopping center
and does not return. Another bus is
sent, but a half dozen people left things on the original bus. After an hour minibuses are sent to take us
to the original bus which had an accident. Things are retrieved, and we return
to the ship a couple of hours late.
Laem Chabang is a town of
about 60,000 and home to the twentieth busiest port in the world. I see a half dozen container ships loading
and unloading as we tie up at the dock. Pattaya,
the beach area, is also a traditional center of the sex trade although that is
not mentioned by the ship’s program. We
see little sign of it and Thailand has been making attempts at its elimination.
On the ship in the late
afternoon I see a program by the children of the Father Ray Foundation which
maintains a Children’s Home, a Vocational School for People with Disabilities,
a Children’s Village, and a School for the Blind. One of their projects is to reach out to the
young people who come to Laem Chabang and get sucked into dead ends and
crime. Five groups of students appear including
a group of wheel chair dancers, and adorable troop of little children in the
day care program and some young boys demonstrating Thai kick-boxing.
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